It’s Not Your Fault: Combatting Guilt for the Neurodivergent Individual
Shame is one of the harshest beliefs we buy into about ourselves, but neurodivergency isn’t a bad thing; it’s just different.
My brain is wired to make impulsive decisions. Even with medication, even with therapy, I can’t always control my impulsiveness. Last week, I ordered Chinese takeout despite having a fridge full of food. In March, I quit my bartending job to start my freelancing career. It felt like a good idea at the time. It felt like I was finally moving forward with my life.
Yesterday, I filed for unemployment. One of my regular clients had to end our project early due to life circumstances outside her control, and while I’ve had other consistent work, the gap between pay periods is huge, and I haven’t found a true replacement for the money I was missing out on.
“I just feel stupid,” I said to my mom on the phone. “I could have put aside more money. I could have put more effort into finding more work. I quit my job to do this because I felt confident, and now I’m not doing well and I feel like a massive f***ing idiot.”
“I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself,” she said.
My therapist has told me the same thing before. So has my psychiatrist. So has my partner. So did the therapist I had a few years back. In fact, every source of support in my life has, at some point, said some variation of those words to me: I think you’re too hard on yourself.
But how can I not be hard on myself? How can I not feel like an absolute failure when I struggle every day to do simple tasks that anyone else could do without even thinking about them?
Here is a list of things that have been impossible for me to do:
- Taking my car to the mechanic
- Putting my books on the shelves of my new apartment
- Calling the bank about refinancing my student loans
- Calling the other bank about refinancing my auto loan
- Contacting doctors for an article
- Booking a dentist appointment
- Going to the gym
Instead of doing these necessary things, I spent two hours hunting for a dish rack on Amazon. I deal with ADHD every day, and I will for the rest of my life. For a long time, I thought I was fundamentally flawed. Worthless. I felt guilt and shame, and I hated myself. I hated that I couldn’t be like everyone else and just do things. I’m confident in saying I’m not alone with those feelings.
Living with ADHD—or any neurodivergency—adds challenge for certain things, but that doesn’t mean we have to feel guilty or ashamed.
ADHD doesn’t get as much attention in adults as it does in children.
CDC data on attention-deficit hyper disorder (ADHD) only offers insight into the children diagnosed with it, not the adults. To many people, “adult ADHD” is a separate beast from “regular ADHD,” or ADHD that affects children. More young boys are diagnosed with ADHD than girls, which has painted a certain image of ADHD in our minds: a hyperactive boy who can’t sit still in class and speaks out often. In other words, a class clown.
I was a class clown in school. I did interrupt and make jokes often. I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 24. Now I’m 25. I can rent a car, and my brain is supposed to be “fully developed.” Or, at least that’s what research has told us. The typical human brain fully develops around age 25. Still, when we look at brains with ADHD, we’re specifically talking about the development of the prefrontal cortex, the region involved in working memory, impulse inhibition, attention, and dopamine release.
One study that looked at brain development in ADHD brains found a significant lag in the prefrontal cortex development compared to neurotypical brains — as much as five years sometimes, but averaging about three. That doesn’t mean that it just takes longer for our brains to “catch up” to neurotypicals’, though. ADHD doesn’t go away when you turn 28, and, voila, you’re “normal.”
It means that pretty much your entire life, your brain has been developing differently, and if you’re not aware of it, you might end up harboring guilt because people have told you there’s something wrong with you.
For example, some children with ADHD tend to lie more often. It’s mostly about little things — saying yes to having cleaned their room when they know they didn’t or denying breaking a vase when no one else could have broken it — and the reason usually isn’t malicious; it’s an avoidance tactic.
ADHD brains are masterful avoiders, real proponents of the out of sight, out of mind philosophy, because, cognitively, it’s difficult for us to prioritize tasks or create plans.
Impulsivity also plays a role here. We often say the first thing that comes to mind, which can cause problems, especially as we get older. I’d always preferred hashing relationship arguments out over text because I could plan out what I would say. In contrast, in-person confrontations left me either dumbfoundedly silent or verbalizing a thought that shouldn’t have left my brain. When you’re an adult, people tend to be a lot less forgiving of lies and impulses.
Lying is just one example of this conundrum, but it surfaces in many other ways. When an adult is disorderly, unmotivated, inattentive, absentminded, or forgetful, they are considered lazy or childish.
“You’re ____ years old,” someone might say. “It’s time to grow up.” Or, perhaps they’ll hit you with the classic, “You need to try harder.”
The truth is, you probably are trying harder, harder than they’ve ever had to try to do certain things. Your partner might be great at managing their to-do list. They wake up every morning, write one out, and have a completely crossed-off list of tasks at the end of the day. Yours might have looked the same for the past week. Maybe you didn’t realize how long a project would take, or maybe it’s been disgustingly hot and humid, so you’ve put off washing your car.
It’s difficult to explain to others how something so simple to them could be so difficult to us, but there isn’t really an explanation other than, “It just is.” That’s it. It just is. It is harder because our brains are fundamentally different, and the inability to provide an understandable explanation is part of the problem.
A neurotypical person can’t grasp why things are so difficult for us, so when they set the standards by which we’re measured, we often feel like we can’t live up to them.
Neurodivergent guilt stems from being held to neurotypical standards.
Psychotherapist Rebecca Olmsted writes, “What appears to others as problematic behaviours…may be perceived internally by the person with ADHD as just more reasons why they really are fundamentally flawed.”
An ex-girlfriend once criticized me for starting a lot of projects I never finished, which was true. I came up with many story ideas I liked, but I’d get discouraged or bored halfway through and abandon them, onto the next thing. However, she only said this after we broke up, so I internalized it and assumed it must have contributed to the breakup. In fact, I took on every bit of criticism and reached a conclusion: I was a broken, lazy, unlovable person.
I was 22, failing to meet the expectations that were put on me. I worked as a waiter in a burger restaurant, and I had no plans of moving to LA to “put my screenwriting degree to use.” My car had a broken heating system, and it rattled every time I hit a bump in the road. I was depressed and prone to panic attacks. I blurted things out — even things I wasn’t meant to share — without thinking, and it hurt people around me. I drank a lot because it was the only thing that shut my brain up. When other people looked at me, they saw a sad burnout with a drinking problem going nowhere in life.
Actually, that’s probably not true. It’s what I felt and what I assumed they saw. I saw myself achieving less than my peers, and I thought it was because I wasn’t putting in the effort. I felt like I was cursed to a life of mediocrity and unhappiness. I didn’t know why I felt so unmotivated and lethargic — just that I did — or why I had such a hard time doing important things even though everyone around me could. I was ashamed.
Evidently, shame is a major side effect of undiagnosed ADHD in adults. Psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and podcast host Edward Hallowell, writes, “The older you get, the more shame you are apt to feel if your ADHD is undiagnosed…you may feel the only way you can be accepted is by putting on a mask. In addition, you may feel that the real you is fundamentally flawed.”
Shame, he explains, is traumatic. It raises your stress hormones and fragments your memory. It also inhibits your ability to feel any sense of pride in yourself. You might opt not to apply for a job because you assume you’d never get hired anyway. You might not ask someone out because there are twenty better people at the same bar. You might receive an accolade and say it’s a fluke. You’d never earn one, after all.
“You imagine harsh judges everywhere,” Hallowell continues. “You project the harsh judgments you are making of yourself out onto everyone you meet. Soon the world becomes like a huge set of judgmental eyes, looming down on you, and your only option is to hide.”
New York psychiatrist Scott Shapiro takes this idea further. “Shame is not only a feeling,” he says. “It is also a belief that one is broken, damaged, or defective. Having this belief, this experience of shame, can create strong feelings of anxiety and fear. Beliefs are very powerful. Beliefs influence how we see ourselves, how we see our potential in the world.”
Consider too that ADHD often goes unnoticed in adults, and without understanding what we’re dealing with, we can’t learn how to deal with it. Adults with ADHD are also at an increased risk for depressive disorders and anxiety disorders which, in combination, severely impact our lives.
Feelings of depression and anxiety can intensify the shame we feel and the guilt we put on ourselves for “not being good enough.” Another study acknowledged the link between substance abuse and ADHD, finding that those with undiagnosed ADHD are more likely to turn to substances as a means of managing their issues.
Undiagnosed ADHD can lead to behaviors for which we have no explanation and for which we might feel even more shame — turning to alcohol, for example, when you’re feeling anxious. Shame makes feelings of depression worse, making us less motivated to perform tasks, thus leading to further shame.
It’s a vicious cycle, one that’s difficult to address unless we identify the underlying problem: our neurodivergent brains.
This is the trap I’d fallen into over and over again. I’d let someone whose brain functioned, for lack of a better word, normally define what success and failure meant for me, and when I started to believe in those definitions, I also started to believe that I fell on the end of “failure.” It’s the same way I felt when talking to my mom on the phone: I made an impulsive decision to quit a job, but now I’m struggling again because I can’t do basic things like stay on task or manage my money.
Shame reared its ugly head again, and I had no one to blame but myself. I’m the one who didn’t set money aside. I’m the one who took a risky career jump. I’m the one who wasn’t good enough to succeed at it.
I laid on the couch, apathetic and waiting for Ibuprofen to take the back pain I’d gotten from sleeping stiffly away, hating and blaming myself for always being such a failure. Then I realized beating myself up wasn’t doing anyone any good. It’s not my fault I have ADHD, I thought, but it’s the reality of the situation, so what am I going to do about it?
There’s no shame in being neurodivergent, so stop feeling guilty about it.
As Shapiro says, shame is a belief. “Beliefs create part of one’s identity and according to many theories of the mind and personality, beliefs are firmly held and resistant to change.” That doesn’t mean, however, they are immune to change.
There is a stigma surrounding ADHD and the medication used to treat it (stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall) as there is with any neurodivergency or mental illness, but it also influences our perception of neurodivergency as people affected by it. Not only are we constantly battling the neurodivergency itself, but we’re also battling the stigma accompanying it and, likely, people in our lives who don’t empathize with our situation.
If people close to you are accusing you of being lazy or suggesting you don’t try hard enough, it’s likely to contribute to your belief that something is wrong with you.
But here’s a silver lining: Some studies actually suggest ADHD might have benefits that neurotypical brains don’t have. Among ADHD traits, the study cites “high levels of energy and drive, creativity, hyper-focus, agreeableness, empathy and a willingness to assist others” as positives.
Hyper-focus is sometimes called the “secret superpower of ADHD.” Personally, I think that might be going a bit too far, but hyper-focus can be useful if you know how to manage it.
On the one hand, it might mean becoming so enthralled in a video game you lose track of time and forget to eat, but on the other, it might mean completing your project in the course of one day because you tuned the rest of the world out. It’s essentially the same thing, but the subject of your focus is different, and that allows for some powerful possibilities.
Another study explores the creative side of ADHD in more detail, explaining that ADHD minds are better at tackling “loose” idea generation processes, ideas that are less organized and adaptable. Even better, the study didn’t find a difference in creativity between medicated and unmedicated participants, meaning you’re not “missing out” if you decide to take medication.
The study by Sedgwick, Merwood, and Asherson also cites courage and resilience as benefits of ADHD. Our minds tend to thrive in chaotic environments because they stimulate and allow us to shift focus rapidly. A busy Saturday night at a restaurant, for example, offers us an outlet for the inner chaos we’re feeling and lets us make the problem external and manageable. When things go wrong, we can adapt quickly, and we are more likely to face frightening situations head-on.
Interestingly, the study also points to “transcendence” as a positive ADHD trait, defining it as an “appreciation of beauty and excellence.” It’s a common trait, they say, in musicians who, as a group, can emotionally connect with their art and the beauty of the world around them. This ties into our knack for empathy as well.
Despite our inattentiveness, or maybe because of it, we tend to notice things other people might not: the way sunlight catches a glass, or perhaps the subtle shading in someone’s iris, or even the off-ness of their smile and the sadness they’re hiding with it.
It helps to remind ourselves of these things from time to time, particularly when we’re cursing our DNA for wiring us differently. Yes, it’s hard to focus on boring tasks sometimes. Yes, we can be bad at managing money. Yes, it sucks to lose your keys fifteen times a day.
But we’re also creative and humorous, and energetic. We can make the lives of people around us better because of these things. We’re great to have in a room when people brainstorm, which makes us valuable employees.
I know how awful it feels to bear the burden of guilt for something outside of your control. Frankly, it’s easy to blame yourself for everything wrong in your life, and while ADHD isn’t an excuse — I’ve most certainly done crappy, selfish, thoughtless things; we all have — it is an explanation we can offer for why we’re struggling.
Having an open dialogue about this with people in our lives brings us one step closer to removing the stigma around ADHD, but more importantly, it helps other people develop empathy.
They might never understand why we can’t just call the dentist, but they can see that we’re trying. And remember, too, that some of the things you like most about yourself might not be there if you were “normal.”
If you found this piece helpful, consider checking out my personal website to see all of my work or get in contact: www.austinharveywrites.com
